Posted
by
timothy
on Saturday November 20, 2010 @12:37PM
from the west-coast-style dept.

comforteagle writes "Senator Wyden of Oregon has objected to a bill in committee that if passed would have given the government the ability to censor the Internet. His objection effectively stop its current passing, forcing it to be introduced again if the bill is to continue — which it may not. Oregonians, please send this man pats on the back."

This commendable Senator took care of the first half of the problem. The second half of the problem is more institutional in nature. It grants one hell of an advantage to those who view various forms of freedom as an inconvenient hinderence to their goals.

All oppressive laws have this in common: those who push for them view a defeat like this as merely a delay or minor setback. They can keep trying to get them passed, over and over, through defeat after defeat, until finally they find a Congress more willing to be swayed by their arguments. They understand that once they get the law passed, it will stay on the books forever and will never be repealed. Agencies, bureaucracies and contractors will form around it and give it even more inertia. After a generation or two people will grow up knowing no other status quo.

Yes, but remember that originally the House was elected by popular vote while the Senators were appointed by the legislatures of their respective states. The "cooling" effect had a lot to do with being unconcerned with things like winning campaigns, ensuring that campaign contributions keep flowing, popular trends, and knee-jerk emotional issues (like fear-based security theater). Senators had more of a free hand to do what they personally believed should be done, compared to representatives in the House who always had to wet their finger to see which way the wind was blowing.

That purpose is largely defeated by having the senators elected by popular vote. Now they have to represent their campaign donors and supporters more than they represent their states, same as the House.

Pass a constitutional amendment that strips Congress of civil immunity for their unconstitutional laws. Let them get sued for lost wages, profits, trebble damages and emotional distress and suddenly we'll have 535 originalist legal scholars.

There's only one problem with this approach: the media companies. You see, they get to talk right up until the end. They get to say whatever they want. And if they don't like you, you're toast. (To take some older examples, think of Dukakis or Quayle.)

So now you're telling people that they can't say what they want, with their own money, unless they happen to own a newspaper, or a TV or radio station. Do you really think that will bring us a better political class?

If you want the money out of politics, you have to take the politics out of money. Quite a few libertarians have been advocating this for a long time. Otherwise, the money will always be there, and all you're doing is ignoring the First Amendment in order to try to score political points.

And all of those cool military gadgets we ooh and ahh over will be deployed against citizens aspiring for freedom.

Revolution does not necessarily mean "violent uprising." Which is good, because it seems to me that the people most likely to take arms up against their government right now would be MORE in favor of censorship and less personal rights.

Hell, the RIAA and MPAA might decide to sponsor the armed revolution through Fox news.

As probably the strongest congressional proponent of net neutrality (or at least the most acerbic) I am really disappointed to see his name on this list. Yeah, he was a actor/comedian working for the MAFIAA before, but he was able to overcome that bias and see the danger the MAFIAA poses to freedom of expression with their anti net-neutrality stance, so why did he cave on this one?

Rightly or wrongly, the difference that Slashdot perceives is that COICA enables the government to censor, whereas net neutrality enables the government to prevent censorship by others.

Yet the most powerful argument against net neutrality is that it could (and likely would) result in government censorship. Net neutrality is nothing more than a backdoor attempt to put the Internet under the purview of the government, packaged such that it sells to geeks.

OK - I'm in a band. We record our parts for our current album at our individual homes, and share them with each other, at full quality (24bit, 88.2KHz is what we are recording at) - and my drum set is oh, lets see, in some tracks upwards of 15 tracks at that sample/bit rate.
Hey look! Lots of legal bandwidth usage!